IT'S A MAD, MAD WORLD

1963

Visitor Tabs

Description

A comical fiction film by a local York filmmaker Patrick Olsen, this film features two characters dressed in eighteenth century clothes: a cellist and, presumably, his servant. The film stars a young David Bradley, now a famous actor of stage and screen, in an early role as well as fellow York actor Tony Akrill.

The opening has the ‘servant’ in top hat and tails sitting next to a sign of the film’s title, ‘It’s A Mad, Mad World.’ He holds the ‘W’ as it is falling off the wall, and smoke is coming out of his hat.

The film begins with a cellist, dressed in Georgian costume and a white wig, sitting in a field playing his cello. Next to him on one side is a sculpture of the Venus de Milo and a table with an antique telephone on the other.

With a happy expression on his face, he begins to play the cello, but then stops and looks into the distance. He picks up some binoculars and looks at a musical score on a stand in the next field. Looking agitated, he picks up the phone.

A man is lying on a fallen tree branch asleep while an antique phone is hopping about on its cradle besides him. Eventually the man wakes and answers the phone. He gets up and, in a comical manner. He arrives at the music score, reads it, turns the page, fastens it to the page, and signals to the cellist. Then, muttering curses under his breath, his runs off across a field and ducks behind a thicket of grass. The cellist sees the turned page through his binoculars and continues to play. Meanwhile the servant comes up from behind, picks up the statue, and runs off with it.

Context

This is a film made by Patrick Olsen, a York based puppeteer, stage designer and filmmaker. The YFA has a number of films made by Olsen; two of these, which show off Patrick’s many talents, can be seen on YFA Online – Yellow Balloon (1969) and York Mystery Plays 1973. Another short comedy film on YFA Online involving both Patrick Olsen and Tony Ackrill is Love’s First Flush, made ten years earlier. In It's a Mad, Mad World Patrick got together with two of his acting friends from the Rowntree Youth Theatre, where Patrick had worked for a long time as a stage designer, not only designing stage sets but also making and painting them (see the Context for Yellow Balloon). Both Patrick Olsen and Tony Ackrill are uncertain as to when this film was made, but they do recall filming it on Clifton Ings, behind St Peter’s School. Patrick recently improved upon the original soundtrack.

Although the title is similar to that of the comedy film, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, which came out in 1963, Patrick Olsen says that it was inspired by that great British comedy of the 1950s, The Goon Show. It was probably the general anarchic nature of the Goon shows which the film follows, rather than any particular show – which was a mainly a radio show (there was the telegoons, and Milligan wrote other goon type TV shows) and didn’t really have much in the way of plots – although there is a scene in Napoleon’s Piano where Neddie Seagoon reads a paper through a telescope!

This film has particular interest because it features David Bradley, who has gone on to have a very successful career as an actor on stage, on TV and in film. David Bradley was born in York, in 1942, and his first acting experience was with the Co-operative Players, but also the Settlement Players. It was the director of the latter, Edward Taylor, who, along with a school teacher, encouraged David in his acting ambitions. David trained at RADA in 1966, and from there worked extensively with the Royal Shakespeare Company and many other theatres, usually playing in Shakespeare and other classic plays, winning a number of awards, including an Olivier for King Lear.

David played in the York Mystery Plays as far back as 1960 as a knight, and later as Jesus in 1976, But Bradley is perhaps most widely known as Filch the caretaker at Hogwarts in the Harry Potter films. (He is not to be confused with David Bradley the young star of Kes, who was unable to use his name when applying for equity membership because his namesake got there first!).

Tony Akrill was a regular actor with the Rowntree Youth Theatre, who, as can be seen in this film, had a great talent for comedy (for more on Tony see the Context for Love’s First Flush). Tony and David Bradley performed together on several occasions; such as West Side Story, where Tony played Action of the Jets, and David Bradley played Bernardo, the leader of the Sharks. The two of them also played together as the ugly sisteres in the pantomime Cinderella, where they were given free reign to ad lib their parts.